Yahoo! in talks to acquire Gmail add-on

Swoops for Xoopit

Yahoo! has confirmed its acquisition of Xoopit. You can read the full story here

Yahoo! is apparently on the verge of acquiring Xoopit, a startup offering tools for mining and redistributing all those photos, videos, and other files buried your web-based email client.

Xoopit originally offered its webmailware only as a Firefox plug-in for use with Google's Gmail. Then, in December, Yahoo! rolled the company's tools into an updated version of Yahoo! Mail, the web's most popular email client.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! is in "final stage negotiations" with Xoopit, with an eye on acquiring the company for around $20 million. Yahoo! declined to comment on the report. Xoopit did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.

This means we're still in the dark on how to pronounce its rather painful moniker. Some say "ZOO-pit." Other say "SWOO-pit."

However you pronounce it, Xoopit lets you pluck multimedia and data files from your webmail account, before sharing them with friends, colleagues, and the world at large. "Xoopit finds the pictures, videos, and files buried in webmail's gigabytes of free storage and allows users to share, comment, and post them to their contacts on other social networks and blogs," reads the company's boilerplate description.

Sources tell The Journal that Yahoo! is interested in Xoopit as part of its strategy to link its mail service with other widely-used services across the net. Which is merely stating the obvious. Xoopit is already integrated with Yahoo! Mail, along with apps that hook into services such as PayPal and Zumo.

Yesterday, Yahoo! also introduced a new home page that lets users tie straight into services such as eBay, Twitter, and Facebook.

For the past several months, as revenue waned amidst a soft economy, Yahoo! has worked to trim costs, laying off 10 per cent of its workforce last October, axing another 5 per cent in April, and shuttering various little-used services. But during yesterday's quarterly earnings call, CEO Carol Bartz and new CFO Tim Morse told the world that the company is now ready to spend. Bartz promised to put $75m into new hires, new tech, and Yahoo!-brand-flaunting marketing campaigns. ®